Follow up to Prof. Gregory's Talk

Thanks again to Prof. Paul Gregory for his great talk today! I wanted to post a few of links related to things that Prof. Gregory mentioned. First, recall the functionalist idea that you can build a mind out of any sort of material that "gets the job done". A classic-proof-of-concept for functionalism is the tic-tac-toe player that Danny Hillis built from Tinkertoys. (The idea that functionalism may get you no farther than tic-tac-toe is one of the themes of our course.) Second, the Story of Mel is a delightful example of how the best programmers exploit what has come to be called the leaky levels concept. Finally, Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on the Frame Problem that Prof. Gregory and I discussed.